In fact, this one didn't work especially well for me, possibly because it was all new-I hadn't read this one before. The title's relevance does not come clear until very near the end, which I found a bit unsatisfactory. Again, complex relationships, a mixture of past and present, and hints of untold tales begging to be revealed. Mary Adare clashes with her cousin Sita inherits the meat business develops a bit of a crush on Russell Kashpaw, a veteran of two wars and many wounds and finds unsettling friendship with Russell's half sister, Celestine, the mother of a child Mary would wish to call her own. In the second of the Love Medicine series, Erdrich brings her German ancestry into the mix, with the story of how the strangely orphaned Adare children arrived in Argus, North Dakota, looking for their Aunt Fritzie, who runs a butcher shop with her husband. I'm giving it a 3.5/5, but I don't know if I feel great about that. Rating: It's impossible to know how to rate this, because it's either flawed but still really good or rather disappointing, depending on what standards I try to hold it to. And, while they and their inter-relationships are interesting, they're also often horrible and offputting, and there were times when I found myself getting tired of, or even disgusted with, their company.Īnd yet, even when she's doing things that don't 100% work. And the characters have much the same kind of feel to them, really, that mix of the deeply believable and the weirdly over-the-top. It's not that I have an issue with the absurd or the surreal, but there's something about it that just doesn't quite mesh with the more realistic aspects. Which just kind of left me going, 'huh?' for the rest of the novel. Which I think is deliberate, but maybe it doesn't quite work for me? Most notably, there's the precipitating event of the whole story, in which a woman abandons her children in a strange, almost surreal sort of way: by buying a ticket for a ride in an airplane at a fair, and then just flying off with the pilot, forever. I think it's that so many of the most pivotal events in it have this feeling of absurdity about them.

Louise Erdrich is an excellent, compelling writer, with a fine sense of the quirks of human psychology, all of which is entirely evident in this early novel.

The beet queen by louise erdrich